Corey Seager played the back half of this season with a bone spur in his elbow, and Texas only said so after the last out of their year was already recorded. Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young laid it out a day after the club wrapped up the schedule, which is how it always goes. The medical file gets unsealed the moment the games stop counting.
That is the part worth sitting with. Seager is 32 and just finished the fifth season of a 10-year contract, so the deal is exactly at its halfway pole, and half of it is now written down. A bone spur in the elbow is not a headline injury. It is a nagging one. It touches the throw from the hole and it touches a swing that lives on torque, and it does not go away because a shortstop decides to be tough about it. He decided to be tough about it anyway, for months.
checked the almanac: Seager is one of four players ever to win World Series MVP twice. Koufax, Gibson, Reggie, Seager. That is the whole list, and it is a strange and wonderful list to be on, and it tells you what this guy is when October is live.
October is live right now, of course. It just does not involve Texas. The Cubs and Padres open at 10:00 PM ET, and Seager is going to watch that the way the rest of us do, with an arm that needs an answer.
What that answer is, I don't have in front of me, and I'd bet the Rangers don't have a final version of it yet either. A bone spur can sometimes be managed with rest and a winter of quiet. Sometimes it gets cleaned out, which is a short procedure with a real recovery window attached. Nobody has said which way this goes, and anybody telling you they know is guessing.
So here is what I'm watching: whether Seager shows up to camp with a scar or just a story, and whether Young's disclosure turns into a fuller accounting of a season that ended early in Arlington. Teams that volunteer one medical detail in September usually have a second one waiting in November.